GOLF / RICH TOSCHES : Clubs Wage Heated Battle to Save Courses

Try this: Lie down in an open space with little or no shade from the sun that has scorched the Valley for the past week and sent temperatures blasting past the 100-degree mark. Allow hundreds of people with sharp, metal spikes on their shoes to walk all over you. Don’t drink any water for two or three days.

There. Now you’re dead.

That’s the problem faced by the grass on every golf course in the Valley these days. The relentless sun has tried to bake courses into the general consistency of cement. Course superintendents, however, have waged a grueling battle and appear to be winning.

The weapons? Water. And fungicide. And more water.

With the heavy winter rains alleviating the severe drought conditions, golf officials are free to use torrents of water to keep their courses green.

How much water?

Well, the average household in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District uses about 400 gallons of water a day. A typical, 18-hole championship golf course in the Valley, with about 100 acres of grass, trees and shrubs, can use as many as 700,000 gallons every 24 hours during these brutal, Arabian-type days.

“We water, then we water and then we water and then we water some more at night,” said Vince Vasquez, superintendent of the posh Woodland Hills Country Club.

Vasquez has been putting in long hours worrying about and then battling the elements. Woodland Hills has received among the harshest doses of the recent weather, with temperatures soaring well past 100. On Sunday, the mercury nearly blew out the top of the thermometer at that country club, topping out at a blistering 110 degrees.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, along with the temperatures has come Amazon-like humidity, which causes a problem just as serious as the heat: fungus. When the temperature hit 110 at Woodland Hills Country Club on Sunday, the humidity level was a drenching 95%, according to Vasquez.

“It’s the combination that makes such a problem,” he said. “You quickly can get a fungus growth that looks like foam on the grass. And then it spreads and kills everything.”

Heavy doses of fungicide, along with the enormous amounts of water and Vasquez’s expertise, have kept Woodland Hills Country Club in perfect condition. Even the greens of sensitive bent grass have survived.

“The greens, that is what worries me,” Vasquez said. ‘We have to water them every three or four hours to keep them from dying. The greens are like a baby. They need constant care. It’s like having 18 babies to take care of.”

In 20 years of golf course maintenance in the Valley, Vasquez said only one other summer, in 1984, brought such conditions.

“But we came through it OK in 1984 and we’ll get through this too,” he said.

At the public Van Nuys Golf Course, the same conditions have pushed Billi Felix--the only female course superintendent in the area--to the limit. But she, like Vasquez, is coping.

“The humidity has been horrible. That’s the real problem,” she said. “The heat you can cope with. Just pour more water on (the course). But this humidity can be a disaster. We use fungicide every day to fight it. The conditions have just been horrible.”

But the course, one of the most heavily played in the Valley, is holding up quite nicely.

At the private El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana, the same problems exist. But El Caballero has one weapon most courses don’t--a $1 million computerized watering system that senses the moisture level in the ground and applies water automatically to any area that needs it.

“It does the job,” said club official Bernie Shapiro, 76, who founded and built the golf course 36 years ago. “For a million dollars, it should work OK. I built the course for $360,000.”

When course superintendents get a moment to rest from their 24-hour-a-day worries, they curl up in their offices with a good radio. “The weather reports, that’s what we listen to all the time,” Vasquez said. “We need some cool, dry weather and we need it real soon.”

Forecasters say course superintendents--and the rest of us--will get their wish by the end of the week. Temperatures in the upper 80s are expected to move into the area, and humidity levels also are expected to drop dramatically.

Aces up: The stifling conditions have not deterred most golfers. And for some, the rewards have been great. In the past 10 days, six area golfers have carded a hole in one--led by Garry Schweiger of Woodland Hills, who ripped his tee shot into the cup on the 195-yard, par-three third hole at Woodley Lakes Golf Course with a three-iron.

Also connecting for aces were John Blasewitz of Pasadena (177-yard 15th hole at Woodley Lakes), Ray Beck of Burbank (160-yard seventh hole at Griffith Park), Dave Morrell of Simi Valley (155-yard 16th hole at Encino), David Rabenowitz of Sherman Oaks (152-yard fourth hole at Hansen Dam) and Joan Shackleford of Simi Valley (127-yard 13th hole at Balboa).